Business: “I’d like one order of your address, one order of your social security number, a cell phone number and I’d like to wash that down with your credit history.”Data Broker: “Certainly sir. Unfortunately, the cell phone number isn’t available but we can get you either a published or unpublished phone number.”Business: “I’ll have the unpublished number then, how about whether or not they own a vehicle?”Data Broker: “Aircraft, boat or automobile?”Business: “Aircraft and/or boat.”Data Broker: “All right, that’ll be $38.25 please.”

(Tip of the hat to Cap, I stole his ‘conversation’ intro style)
Check out this Swipe Toolkit Data Calculator. They’ve pulled data from Accurint, Aristotle, ChoicePoint, ChoiceTrust, DocuSearch, Experian, KnowX, Merlin Data, and Pallorium to figure out how much each piece of data would cost a business to buy, the probable public data source, and which data broker to approach for this information – all in a handy and easy to use Flash calculator! It’s pretty cool, you should check it out.

Most expensive bits? Military records cost $35 and bankruptcy records are $26.50.

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4 Responses to “How Much Is Your Personal Data Worth?”

It’s scary how easily the bad guys can get whatever info they want. Then, ironically, we hear about security of information breaches at places like ChoicePoint. I have two problems with that. 1) if you can just buy the info, isn’t a security breach simply someone stealing their “inventory” without paying for it? 2) what are they doing with my info in the first place. If they didn’t collect it, they wouldn’t have to send me a letter apologizing that someone got to it without paying for it!

Well, ChoicePoint wasn’t supposed to even hold the data that it was holding and while some of it is available through these services (who get this data from public sources), some of it was not public (like credit card numbers). Either way, it’s scary.

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